Olivia Wakim

Olivia Wakim tells stories about how restaurants and gathering places shape everyday life, blending service-focused dining guides with reporting on food, culture and community. She is a lifestyle reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, working across its food, lifestyle and culture sections and covering the restaurant industry alongside broader arts and culture stories. Her coverage stands out for the way it links what people eat and where they meet to the neighborhoods, small businesses and social spaces that surround them.

Food, culture and community spaces

Wakim’s lifestyle reporting often looks beyond the plate to explore how public spaces foster connection and belonging. In her feature on why metro Atlanta needs “third places” and how communities are building them, she explains the concept of social spaces outside home and work and highlights breweries, bookstores, coffee shops and craft clubs that function as modern gathering spots. She profiles people who create these spaces and traces how they support community, making social infrastructure a recurring thread in her work. That same interest appears in her story on what a new food hall could mean for a south Atlanta neighborhood, where she reports on a development anchored by stalls such as Staxx and examines how the project may reshape local options and community life.

Her piece on The Reading Room, an independent bookstore and food-focused space, likewise centers the founders’ story and the vision behind the venue. Rather than only listing what to eat or buy, she spends time on why these places exist and what they offer the surrounding community. Across these features, Wakim’s distinguishing focus is on food as a doorway into larger questions about access, gathering and neighborhood change.

Restaurant openings and industry coverage

Wakim covers the restaurant industry as a beat, tracking openings, expansions and chef moves with a clear sense of the local scene. In a round-up on more than two dozen new metro Atlanta restaurants that opened in a jam-packed June, co-bylined with a colleague, she helps map out the pace and range of new concepts across the region. She reports on individual openings such as D’bo’s Daiquiris, Wings and Seafood, a restaurant entering downtown with a focus on daiquiris and comfort food. Her coverage of Mushi Ni’s long-awaited Inman Park restaurant details how the new location expands on a food hall stall with bao and cocktails, and what the larger menu and full bar mean for diners in that neighborhood.

She follows personnel changes as well as real estate, co-writing a story about two chefs landing new gigs, which tracks how talent moves between kitchens and the impact on their new homes. Wakim also picks up more targeted industry angles, such as recognizing a seasonal cocktail like the Pink Kiss at Joey D’s Oak Room, spotlighting how individual menu items can define a bar’s character. Through these pieces, her restaurant coverage mixes broad scene-setting round-ups with close looks at single venues, emphasizing both the business side of openings and the experiences they create for guests.

Service-minded guides for diners and shoppers

Service journalism is a major part of Wakim’s food work, and she writes guides that help readers decide where to go and what to try. In “Cool off with frozen treats at these Atlanta dessert shops and restaurants,” she curates spots where people can find ice cream, shaved ice and other cold desserts, organizing options around the practical question of beating the heat. She brings a similar approach to “12 Southern-made gifts for the foodie on your shopping list,” where she selects regionally made products and frames them as concrete gift ideas for food lovers. Those guides are framed around specific needs or occasions, and each entry gives readers something actionable to do.

Her dining guides extend to experiences as well as objects. An AJC Food feature on seven food tours credits her as the writer and walks audiences through guided tasting routes that offer structured ways to explore the city’s restaurants and culinary history. In another project, she contributes to an Atlanta FIFA World Cup dining guide, connecting global soccer fandom with local food options and helping readers plan where to eat around matches. Across these pieces, Wakim focuses on clarity, utility and variety, making her work especially useful for people looking for curated, locally grounded recommendations.

Multi-platform storytelling and voice

Wakim’s role has evolved from digital content producer on the food and dining team to lifestyle reporter, and that background shows in how she works across formats. She has been described as a digital content producer who understands that every great meal tells a story, underscoring her emphasis on narrative even in short service pieces. She appears in AJC Food social content, including Instagram features where her byline anchors dining guides like the food tours package and the World Cup coverage. Her reporting also feeds into special projects such as the AJC Headline House activation at Krog Street Market, where she is involved in on-site coverage and promotion.

Outside the newsroom, Wakim runs a Substack newsletter that includes her own dining guide, recipes and occasional commentary, extending her food voice beyond the masthead. That personal work mirrors her professional beat: she curates where to eat, shares how to cook and gives readers a sense of her perspective on the dining scene. Taken together, her multi-platform work marks her as a reporter who combines traditional beat coverage with social and newsletter storytelling, while keeping a consistent focus on restaurants, community spaces and the practical details that shape how people experience them.

She joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as an intern in 2023 and now reports on lifestyle, food and culture, giving her a relatively fresh yet steadily expanding body of work on the city’s restaurant and gathering-place ecosystem. Her coverage is distinguished less by criticism and more by accessible, narrative-rich service reporting that connects where people eat, shop and gather to the communities they move through every day.